“The Great Law of Peace” — The Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Question of Influence
SELF-EVIDENT The Road to 1776 Article 16 of 22
It would be a very strange Thing, if six Nations of ignorant Savages should be capable of forming a Scheme for such an Union, and be able to execute it in such a Manner, as that it has subsisted Ages, and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like Union should be impracticable for ten or a Dozen English Colonies, to whom it is more necessary, and must be more advantageous; and who cannot be supposed to want an equal Understanding of their Interests.— Benjamin Franklin to James Parker, March 20, 1751¹
Lancaster
The court house at Lancaster stood in a backcountry town two days’ ride west of Philadelphia, and for two weeks in the summer of 1744 it held the most consequential diplomatic meeting then under way in British North America. The lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania presided. Commissioners had come up from Virginia and over from Maryland. Facing them sat deputies of the Six Nations — Seneca, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Tuscarora, the Mohawk having stayed away — and between the two sides stood a Pennsylvania farmer named Conrad Weiser, who had spent part of his boyhood in a Mohawk town and who now carried every word each side said to the other.²
The business was land. Maryland and Virginia both wanted the Six Nations to give up their claims to country the colonies considered already theirs, and Virginia’s commissioners had come to secure a renunciation after years of friction, and bloodshed, in the Shenandoah back settlements.³ The speaker for the Six Nations was an Onondaga named Canassatego, then about sixty, who had appeared in the colonial records only in the last years of his life and who had become, in those years, the man the English dealt with. On June 26 he answered the commissioner from Maryland, who had grounded his colony’s title on a century of possession. A hundred years, Canassatego said, was nothing measured against the length of time since the claim of his own people began, since they came out of this very ground, and their children had remained on it ever since. He then complained of being hemmed in, short of deer, and subject to inconveniences that had arrived with the English — and, in particular, of the pen and ink work going on at the table, and he pointed at the secretaries taking down what he said.⁴
The pen and ink work went on. On July 2 the Six Nations signed a deed for Virginia: a disclaimer and renunciation of all their claim to land in the colony of Virginia, and an acknowledgment of the King’s right to it. The negotiation had turned on Six Nations claims affecting Virginia’s back settlements, and historians have generally understood the concession in that narrower setting. Virginia read it against its charter of 1609, which ran from sea to sea, and within a few years Virginians were treating the Lancaster deed as a release of everything to the west, including the Ohio country. One of the two Virginia commissioners at Lancaster, Thomas Lee, was a founder of the Ohio Company, whose object was to open exactly that land to settlement and sale.⁵
Two days after signing, on July 4, 1744, Canassatego rose to close the council. He recommended union and good agreement among the colonies as brethren, and told them never to disagree but to keep a strict friendship with one another, by which they would become the stronger. Their wise forefathers, he said, had established union and amity among the Five Nations, which had made them formidable and given them weight and authority with their neighbors. They were a powerful confederacy. If the colonies observed the same methods, they would acquire strength and power, and therefore, whatever befell them, they should never fall out with one another.⁶
The minutes of the council went to Philadelphia and were printed by a shop that had been publishing the proceedings of Indian treaties since 1736, and selling them in small books that did well. The shop belonged to Benjamin Franklin, and his name is on the title page of the Lancaster imprint.⁷
That is the whole of the documented transmission event at its center: a speech given in Onondaga, rendered into English by a single interpreter with interests of his own, written down by a secretary the speaker had just objected to, and printed by a man who was not in the room. Every article in this series so far has worked from books — who read whom, which edition, whose library, what the print runs were. This one works from a body of law that was not written in English for another century and a half, from a speech that survives in a translation, and from the testimony of the people who were watching. The question it has to answer is what such evidence can carry.
The Woodlands
The five nations of the Haudenosaunee — the people of the longhouse, known to the French and the English and through them to almost all the scholarship as the Iroquois — occupied a band of country running east and west across what is now upstate New York.⁸ They described that country as a single longhouse, the bark-covered dwelling in which several related families lived along a central row of fires. The Mohawk, farthest east, were the keepers of the eastern door. The Seneca, farthest west, were the keepers of the western door. In the middle sat the Onondaga, who kept the fire, meaning that the Grand Council met in their country and that they opened and closed it. Between the Mohawk and the Onondaga were the Oneida, and between the Onondaga and the Seneca were the Cayuga.⁹
They were five nations when the league was made, and this article calls them the Five Nations when it speaks of the period before the early eighteenth century and the Six Nations afterward. The Tuscarora, an Iroquoian-speaking people driven north from Carolina after a war there, were taken in around 1722. They came in without seats at the council. The fifty titles fixed by the founding law could not be added to, so the Tuscarora had no independent voice in the Grand Council and raised their business through the Cayuga.¹⁰ Canassatego was speaking for a confederacy of six nations at Lancaster in 1744 and he referred to the work of his forefathers as a union among five, which was purposeful as the founding and the membership were different statuses.
A reader who knows the eighteenth century mostly through its parliaments and its pamphlets may need a few things clarified before the rest of this article will make sense.
A treaty council was not the signing of a document. It was a proceeding that ran for days or weeks, governed by forms, in which each side spoke in turn and nobody answered on the same day he was addressed, because an immediate answer implied that the speaker had not been taken seriously. Speeches were made in the open air or in a hall, sentence by sentence through an interpreter, and the colonial secretaries wrote down the English. What survives is therefore the English, taken at interpretation speed, and it is the only text there is.¹¹
Wampum was not simply Indian money, whatever Europeans increasingly made of it as currency. It was cylindrical shell bead, white and purple, worked into strings and belts. In Haudenosaunee practice a string or a belt was what made a statement official: it accompanied a proposition and was handed across to the other side. Belts carried invitations, messages, and proposals still open as well as settled agreements, and taking one did not by itself signify assent to everything it accompanied. A belt in the hands of a speaker who could recite what it stood for was the record, and the recitation, not the object alone, was the document. Colonial officials learned the practice well enough to use it, and the treaty minutes routinely note that a belt was given.¹²
The alliance between the Haudenosaunee and the English colonies had a name of its own, the Covenant Chain, first with New York and eventually reaching most of the colonies from New England to Virginia. The Chain had to be maintained. It was spoken of as a chain that tarnished and needed brightening, and the treaty councils were the brightening. What each side wanted from each other was concrete.
The colonies wanted:
The Haudenosaunee positioned against the French
The Haudenosaunee to restrain or speak for the peoples living on their western and southern flank
And increasingly wanted Haudenosaunee signatures on land.
The Haudenosaunee wanted:
Trade at fair rates
The French balanced by the English without becoming the property of either
And wanted the encroachment on their country stopped.¹³
That is the setting. What follows is the polity the colonists were watching, described as far as possible in the terms it used about itself.
The Great Law
The Founding
Before the law there was the feud. Across the surviving traditions one problem recurs: the five peoples had fallen into a condition of retaliatory killing in which every death required another, so that the obligation to avenge ran without end and no one could stop it alone.¹⁴
Into this came a man from the north, remembered as the Peacemaker. His personal name is used in ceremony, and many Haudenosaunee hold that it should not be spoken casually; this article follows that usage and gives the name only in a note.¹⁵ He carried a message of peace, power, and righteousness. Jigonhsasee, a woman who fed warriors passing through her country, is remembered in many accounts as the first to accept it, and is called the Mother of Nations. Among those who joined him was Hiawatha, a grieving Onondaga who had lost his daughters and who became the Peacemaker’s speaker. The obstacle was another Onondaga, Tadodaho, whose mind was described as twisted and whose hair was snakes. The versions differ on the order of these encounters and on who did what.
However, what does matter is that Hiawatha’s grief was addressed before anything else could be. The wiping of tears, the unstopping of the throat — the ritual by which a person made incapable by loss is returned to the condition in which he can transact business — is the condolence, and the founding rests on it rather than merely including it. In the founding tradition, a polity built on the ending of blood feud begins with a procedure for grief. What also matters is that Tadodaho was not defeated. He was combed, straightened, and given the presiding place. The man who had been the obstacle became the keeper of the fire, and the title he held is the title the Onondaga firekeeper has held since.
The weapons were buried and a great white pine was planted over them, its roots running out in four directions so that any nation that followed a root to its source might take shelter under the tree and be admitted. That is the Tree of Peace, and it is an institution rather than a figure of speech: to follow the white roots was to seek membership.
When this happened specifically is unknown. The founding accounts describe a darkening of the sun. Three candidate eclipses anchor three candidate dates. Barbara A. Mann and Jerry L. Fields, working from Haudenosaunee oral historians alongside archaeology and astronomical tables, argue for a total eclipse of August 31, 1142. A second reading puts the founding at 1451, a generation before contact. A third, associated with Dean Snow, fixes it by an eclipse of 1536, which is after contact. The proposed dates therefore span roughly four centuries, and they do not all fall on the same side of 1492: on the earlier readings the Confederacy is pre-Columbian, on the latest it is not. The chronology is contested, and none of it supplies any basis for ranking the founding against anything happening on the other side of the ocean.¹⁶
The Fifty Titles
The Grand Council is fifty titles, and the number has not changed. Nine belong to the Mohawk, nine to the Oneida, fourteen to the Onondaga, ten to the Cayuga, and eight to the Seneca. The distribution is unequal and is fixed by the founding law; it does not track population, and no one has ever redistributed it.¹⁷
The men who hold these titles are called hoyaneh, which the Confederacy renders as caretakers of the peace. English writers from the seventeenth century onward called them sachems, and the treaty minutes use that word.¹⁸ The title is not an office a man wins. It is a name, held before him by others, which he is raised to and which he then answers to; when he dies or is removed, the name is given to another and the line of the title continues. The raising is done by the condolence, the same ceremony invented for Hiawatha’s grief: the council of the bereaved side is consoled by the other side and the successor is installed in the same proceeding. A people that handles succession and mourning in one rite has made a decision about what government is for.
The Clan Mothers
A title belongs to a clan, and the clan’s senior woman chooses the man who will hold it. There are forty-nine of these women — nine Mohawk, nine Oneida, thirteen Onondaga, ten Cayuga, eight Seneca. The Confederacy’s own account of its government describes the clan mother’s responsibility as looking to the welfare of her clan, and her authority as including both the selection of the man who carries the title and his removal.¹⁹ The transcribed law sets out a procedure of warning before a titleholder is set aside, and the warnings run through the clan mother.²⁰
It is worth being exact about what this is and is not. It is not a franchise and there was no polling. A woman of standing in a matrilineal clan chose the man who would speak for that clan in the council of the five nations, and could set him aside; the installation itself was performed by the condolence council. She held that authority in her own right and not by delegation from anybody. It had no close analogue in the European constitutional systems the colonists knew.
One Mind
Business at Onondaga moves in a fixed order across three benches. The Mohawk and Seneca form the Older Brothers. The Oneida and Cayuga form the Younger Brothers. The Onondaga sit separately as the Firekeepers, and among their fourteen titleholders sits Tadodaho, who presides. A question is presented by the Firekeepers, taken up first by the Older Brothers, passed across the fire to the Younger Brothers, returned to the Older Brothers, and then put to the Firekeepers, who either declare that the council is of one mind or send the matter back.²¹
Nothing in that sequence counts votes. The object is agreement, which the tradition speaks of as being of one mind, and the procedure is built to produce it by moving a question back and forth until the sides arrive at the same place or the matter is dropped. A single delegation that will not agree does not lose; it stops the business. That is a real cost of speed in the political proceedings.
The other structural fact is the division of authority. Each nation governed its own internal affairs. The council at Onondaga dealt with what was common — relations with outsiders, war, peace — and had no jurisdiction over what a nation did inside its own country. However, words like federalism, constitution, separation of powers, and checks and balances are European analytical vocabulary, and applying them to the Haudenosaunee describes their policy and procedures in somebody else’s terms and quietly converts them into a version of Europe, which is an unfit comparison. Haudenosaunee sources themselves do sometimes reach for the comparative vocabulary when explaining the government to outsiders — the Onondaga Nation’s own account describes the Peacemaker as having created a system of checks and balances among the nations.
The Text and Its Date
Here is the problem that comes from the history of this account, and the first time the Great Law is quoted anywhere it has to be stated.
The Gayanashagowa was carried in memory and in wampum. It was recited. It was not written in English until the late nineteenth century, and the versions now in circulation are later still. Seth Newhouse, of Mohawk and Onondaga parentage, arranged a manuscript version at the Six Nations of the Grand River in 1885; the council there declined to endorse it. A version compiled by a committee of chiefs of the Six Nations council around 1900 was published separately in the following decade. Arthur C. Parker collected two manuscripts at Six Nations in 1910 and printed both in 1916 as a New York State Museum bulletin, under a title that called the Great Law a constitution. Other renderings exist, including one taken down from the Onondaga speaker John Arthur Gibson in 1912 and not published until 1992. There is no single English text authorized by the Confederacy as a whole, and the versions differ.²²
Two historical notes result, and both are worth understanding.
The first is that no printed Great Law was available to anyone in the eighteenth century. Franklin could not have read it. Neither could any delegate at Albany, or at Philadelphia in 1787. What the colonists had access to was the Haudenosaunee themselves — the councils, the speeches, the conduct of the Confederacy in its dealings — and whatever they were told by men like Weiser who had lived inside it. Any argument about what the framers took from the Great Law has to run through observation, because there was no text to consult.
The second is that the printed text comes out of a particular place and moment. The Six Nations of the Grand River is in Ontario, and it is there because of the American Revolution. The earliest substantial written versions of the Great Law came out of communities shaped by the dispersal our history describes in its later sections, set down by people who had reason to fear that what they held in memory and in belts could be lost. When this article quotes the Great Law, it is quoting an English text of 1885 or later.
The belts deserve the same care. A wampum belt is a genuine record and the Haudenosaunee are right that it is one. It is not a document with a date on it. The surviving objects are of uncertain age, and no dating for the Hiawatha belt is confirmed.²³ Describing any particular belt as the Great Law in physical form asserts more than the object can support.
The Colonists Watching
The Man in the Middle
Conrad Weiser was a German immigrant’s son who had come to New York as a child in the Palatine migration and had spent part of his boyhood in a Mohawk town learning the language. He settled in Pennsylvania, and from the 1730s until his death he was the province’s interpreter and its agent in Indian affairs, working in close partnership with Shikellamy, the Oneida whom the Six Nations had stationed on the Susquehanna to oversee the peoples living there.²⁴
Weiser deserves a far larger place in the transmission story than he usually gets. Everything Canassatego said at Lancaster reached the colonial record through him. He was not a neutral conduit. He was a Pennsylvania landholder, an officer of a provincial government with land business of its own, and a correspondent of the Virginia commissioner who founded the Ohio Company. He was also trusted by the Haudenosaunee, which is why he was useful.
This is the context of the evidence, and it is worth understanding before the argument begins. Colonists met Haudenosaunee traders, warriors, emissaries and neighbors directly; but most of what entered the colonial written record about Haudenosaunee institutions passed through interpreters and brokers like Weiser, in English, in settings where the two sides were negotiating over land.
The Treaty Imprints
From 1736 into the early 1760s, Franklin’s Philadelphia shop printed the proceedings of Indian treaties. They were small books and they sold well, which is a plain commercial fact and more noteworthy than it may seem for there was a colonial reading public that wanted to know what had been said at these councils.²⁵
What the imprints establish is that Franklin’s shop produced and sold this material over a quarter century. Whether Franklin set any particular text himself cannot be established from an imprint. He was also clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly through these years, and he became a commissioner himself, attending the council at Carlisle in 1753 and the congress at Albany in 1754.²⁶ That the example of Haudenosaunee union was in front of Franklin, and that he knew it well enough to argue from it, is not an inference; his own letter of 1751 establishes it. That he personally read Canassatego’s printed words is a reasonable supposition and nothing more.
What Franklin Wrote in 1751
The sentence at the head of this article is the most quoted piece of evidence in the entire controversy, and it is almost always quoted in half. The half that circulates is the part about six nations of ignorant savages. The clause that follows is the point: that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies, who need it more, would gain more by it, and cannot be supposed to understand their own interests any less well. The target of the sentence is the colonists. Franklin is shaming them, and the Haudenosaunee are the instrument.
Two further things about that letter are usually left out, and both should matter.
It is not a letter about the Six Nations. It is Franklin’s reader’s report on somebody else’s manuscript — a pamphlet by Archibald Kennedy, a New York official, on keeping the friendship of the Indians — and it was printed at the back of Kennedy’s pamphlet without Franklin’s name on it. Franklin’s authorship is an attribution, well supported by contemporary evidence but an attribution nonetheless. The letter dates itself March 20, 1750/1, in the dual style then used for dates falling between the first of January and the twenty-fifth of March.²⁷ The bulk of it is about regulating the Indian trade, where to build a fort, why blacksmiths should be posted in Indian towns, and why Franklin thought too many Germans were arriving in Pennsylvania. It also contains Franklin’s view that every Indian was a hunter and therefore a soldier, and describes Haudenosaunee war as skulking and surprise. A reader who meets the admiring sentence in isolation is meeting a fragment of a document with a different character.
And the paragraph immediately following the admiring sentence is Franklin’s own proposal. He wanted a general council formed by all the colonies with a general governor appointed by the Crown to preside over it and confirm its acts; he wanted each colony represented in proportion to the money it paid into a common treasury; and he wanted that treasury filled by an excise on strong liquor.²⁸
Set that beside the fifty titles. The Haudenosaunee council had no separately constituted executive of the kind Franklin proposed, no Crown, no common treasury, no taxing power, and no representation proportioned to payment; Tadodaho presided but did not assent to or veto its acts, and its seats were fixed in numbers that answered to nothing except the founding law. Franklin praised the Confederacy and then, in the next paragraph, proposed a union that shared the general problem of confederation and reproduced almost none of the Haudenosaunee council’s distinctive machinery. That is the strongest single piece of evidence in this whole question, and it sits in the document the argument is built on.
Albany, 1754
The Board of Trade ordered a congress at Albany, and the reason was the Haudenosaunee. Their complaints about their lands were, as the commissioners themselves put it in a protest drafted by Franklin and Thomas Hutchinson, the principal occasion of the unusual and expensive meeting.²⁹ Commissioners from seven colonies sat at the Albany court house from June 19 to July 11, 1754, and about a hundred and fifty Haudenosaunee came.
On July 2 the Six Nations gave their answer to the lieutenant governor of New York. The speaker was a Mohawk, Hendrick Theyanoguin. He said the ancient place of treaty had not seen a public council in three years, that the commissioners had never once invited the Six Nations to smoke with them while the Indians from Canada were welcomed often, and that there were no fortifications anywhere in the country, not even in Albany itself. Then he told them to look at the French, who were fortifying everywhere and were men, and that, as the minutes have it, the English were all like women bare and open without any fortifications. He also told the congress that the quarrel between the governors of Virginia and the governor of Canada was over land that belonged to the Haudenosaunee, and that such a quarrel might end in their destruction.³⁰
The congress heard him. On July 5 and 6, at a private house in Albany with Weiser interpreting, the four Pennsylvania commissioners — Franklin among them, carrying their governor’s written instruction to buy land, and the larger the better — took from the Six Nations a large deed for the Proprietors. The tract ran from the Maryland line northeast along the Kittatinny ridge to the Susquehanna, up the west bank to a point below the mouth of the West Branch, and from there to the western limit of the province. Franklin was one of the commissioners present; he was not formally a party to the transaction.³¹ On July 9 and 10 the congress agreed a plan of union, and Franklin was asked to write out the final draft.
The plan itself is the second piece of evidence that ought to end the strong version of the argument. It proposed a President-General appointed and supported by the Crown, whose assent was required for every act; a Grand Council chosen by the colonial assemblies, with seats apportioned by each colony’s contribution; and a power to lay taxes. The congress had voted, over dissent, that the whole thing should be established by an act of Parliament — which is also the point at which Franklin abandoned the preference for voluntary union he had stated in 1751.³² Where the machinery of the Albany Plan can be traced, it is traced elsewhere: the editors of Franklin’s own papers note that his principal model was argued long ago to be the New England confederation of 1643, which his earlier drafts resembled as well.³³
Every colonial assembly that considered the plan declined it, and it was not adopted at home either. On the grievance that had occasioned the meeting, the congress did something and not much: it pressed the lieutenant governor to address the land complaints in his speech, it sent a committee to hear the Canajoharie Mohawks, and it recorded resolutions about disputed titles and the manner of future purchases. It did not stop the encroachment. Three days after Hendrick spoke, the delegation containing the man who admired the Six Nations took a deed.
The Question of Influence
Three Kinds of Claim
Most of the heat in this argument comes from running three different propositions together. Separated, they are not equally hard.
The first is contact, and it is documented. Franklin printed the treaty proceedings for a quarter century. He attended councils at Carlisle and Albany as a commissioner. He wrote, in March 1751, that a body of people the colonists despised had built and maintained something the colonists could not. None of this is inference. It is in the imprints, the minutes, and the letter.
The second is observation, and it is documented too. English colonists lived alongside a working confederation of five and then six nations for a century and a half, negotiated with it, depended on it, wrote about it, and heard its speakers press the point on them in public. Canassatego recommended union and good agreement among the colonies at Lancaster in 1744, in words Franklin’s shop printed. Hendrick’s rebuke at Albany ten years later was of a different kind: a demand that the English strengthen themselves, hold to the Chain, and stop being defenceless, rather than a recommendation about how they should be governed. The two should not be run together. Colonial Americans had in front of them, for generations, a large and successful polity that held together without a king, ran its common business by agreement, and left its member nations to govern themselves. That such an example was available, and was pressed on them by the people who maintained it, is a fact about the eighteenth century.
The third is documented origin: that the Albany Plan, or the Articles of Confederation, or the Constitution took its structure from the Great Law. This is a different order of claim, and it is the one the scholarship divides on. There is no framer who wrote that he had taken a provision from the Great Law, and there is no Great Law in English for him to have taken it from.
The Argument and Its Participants
Here is what the scholarship shows for the modern case for derivation. The case was made principally by Donald A. Grinde, Jr., and Bruce E. Johansen, in Grinde’s book of 1977, Johansen’s of 1982, and their jointly written volume of 1991.³⁴ In the strongest form of their argument, Haudenosaunee example and Haudenosaunee advocacy shaped colonial and revolutionary thinking about union, and the framers drew on it.
The principal critic was Elisabeth Tooker, an anthropologist of the Haudenosaunee, whose article in Ethnohistory in 1988 reviewed the historical and ethnographic documents and found virtually no support for the proposition that the League furnished the model for the Constitution. Her position was not that the Confederacy was a small thing. It was that the Confederacy rested on its own distinctive principles, as remarkable in conception as those of the Constitution, and that describing it as a draft of somebody else’s document mistakes it. Johansen replied in 1990 and Tooker answered him in the same volume.³⁵
In 1996 the William and Mary Quarterly ran a forum. Philip A. Levy examined the evidentiary practice of the derivation literature and found it wanting, in language that was not gentle. Samuel B. Payne, Jr., compared the institutions directly and argued that the resemblances break down where it matters. The editors invited Grinde and Johansen to respond, and they did, arguing that the standard of proof being demanded of them was not the standard applied to claims of European derivation.³⁶
Haudenosaunee voices in this dispute do not line up neatly on either side of it. Oren Lyons, a Faithkeeper of the Onondaga, brought the question to a Senate committee in the 1980s. Barbara Mann, of Seneca descent, has worked on the founding chronology. What can be said from the documents is that when the matter reached Congress, the Haudenosaunee interest attached to it was not solely historiographical. It was also about whether the relationship between the United States and Indian nations was a relationship between governments. The acknowledgment of the past and the reaffirmation of the relationship were written into the same measure.
What Congress Did in 1988
The resolution is almost always cited incorrectly, including by people who rely on it, so the record is worth stating.
A Senate concurrent resolution, S.Con.Res. 76, was introduced in September 1987, heard by the Committee on Indian Affairs that December, reported by Senator Daniel Inouye, and agreed to by the Senate on a voice vote on October 7, 1988. The House never passed it. The measure that cleared both chambers was a House concurrent resolution, H.Con.Res. 331, agreed to on October 21, 1988 and printed in the Statutes at Large.³⁷
A concurrent resolution is agreed to by both houses in identical form, is not presented to the President, and has no force of law. It expresses the sentiment of Congress. The 1988 measure has two parts. Its operative content reaffirms that the United States deals with Indian tribes as governments and restates the trust obligation. Its preamble states, as settled fact, that the original framers — Washington and Franklin most notably — greatly admired the concepts of the Six Nations, and that the confederation of the thirteen colonies into one republic was influenced by the political system the Confederacy had developed, as were many of the democratic principles incorporated into the Constitution.
That preamble asserts the derivation claim at full strength in exactly the years the specialists were arguing about it. It is evidence of one thing only: that a contested historical proposition had become politically useful enough to be written into a preamble. Legislatures do this constantly and it is not scandalous, but it settles nothing, and a resolution is not a finding. Anyone citing the 1988 acknowledgment as proof of the claim is citing Congress’s opinion of the historians rather than the historians’ evidence.
What Can Be Said
The contact is documented. The observation is documented. What colonial Americans in the northern and middle colonies had in front of them, over generations, was a demonstration that a durable union of self-governing peoples could be maintained without a monarch, made by people they were told were incapable of it, and pressed on them in council by the people who maintained it. Whether that demonstration affected the design of American institutions is a further question, and the surviving evidence does not resolve it.
The derivation is not documented. Where the machinery of the American plans can be traced, it traces to English and colonial precedents that the framers cited and that their editors have identified. The Albany Plan’s own author praised the Confederacy in one paragraph and proposed a Crown-appointed executive in the next.
Saying less than the strong claim is not a concession to the skeptics. It is the only version of the claim that will hold, and it is a great deal.
What Was Lost
The Fire Covered
The Confederacy had held together, through epidemic, through the wars of the seventeenth century, and through a century of being courted and squeezed by two empires. It did not hold together through the American Revolution.
By 1777 the attempt at neutrality had failed. The Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca went with the British, who had at least nominally acknowledged their land and their standing. The Oneida and Tuscarora went with the Americans. Individuals in every nation chose for themselves and not all of them chose with their nation. At Onondaga the fire was covered — the formal suspension of the Grand Council, the thing the Peacemaker’s law existed to prevent.³⁸
On August 6, 1777, at Oriskany in the Mohawk Valley, Mohawk and Seneca warriors ambushed an American militia column that included Oneidas. It was a costly fight, and it was fought between men who knew each other. The organized process founded to end the obligation of revenge among its own members had become a place where that obligation was being discharged again.³⁹
1779
In April 1779 an American force under Goose Van Schaick burned the Onondaga settlements, the country of the firekeepers. On May 31, 1779, George Washington instructed Major General John Sullivan that the immediate objects of his expedition were the total destruction and devastation of the settlements of the Six Nations and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible, and that it would be essential to ruin the crops then in the ground and prevent the planting of more. The campaign ran from June into October. It fought one substantial battle, at Newtown on the Chemung on August 29, and lost nowhere along the way. What it did was burn. Sullivan reported to Washington at the end of September that the towns destroyed by his army amounted to forty besides scattering houses, that the corn destroyed came to a hundred and sixty thousand bushels, and that except for one town near the Allegheny he believed there was not a single town left in the country of the five nations. Counting the season’s other operations, the accountings run to more than forty towns, with the cornfields and the orchards. Those who had fled went to the British at Fort Niagara, where there were not supplies enough for them, and many died that winter of hunger, cold, and disease.⁴⁰
Cayuga clan mothers, hearing the army coming, asked Oneida leaders allied with the Americans to intercede for their towns. Four Oneidas went to Sullivan. He refused them.⁴¹
After
The Second Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1784 was made with a Confederacy the war had broken, by a United States that treated it as a defeated enemy. The Treaty of Canandaigua in 1794 restored a measure of the relationship and set boundaries, and it is the last founding-era instrument in this story.⁴² In between, Mohawk and others who had fought for the Crown went north to the Grand River in Ontario under a British land grant, which is why the Six Nations of the Grand River exists, and why the Great Law was first written in English there. Others did not go. Seneca, Onondaga and Cayuga refugees gathered at Buffalo Creek near the eastern end of Lake Erie, which by 1783 had become the Confederacy’s new political center, where councils were held and the work of putting the Confederacy back together was begun.⁴³
The chain is not subtle. The nation whose admirers say it learned union from the Haudenosaunee destroyed more than forty Haudenosaunee towns within three years of declaring its own independence, and the written text of the Great Law is a document of that dispersal.
The Honest Reckoning
The League That Made War
The Great Law ended the feud among five nations. It did not end war, and a confederacy praised for peace conducted a great deal of it.
The practice the literature calls the mourning war was a means of replacing the dead: a raid taken to bring back captives, some killed, many adopted into the families of the people they replaced, taking their names and their places. It was not incidental to the system. It was the system’s answer to loss, and it required a supply of other people.
From roughly 1609 to 1701, in wars driven by the fur trade, by security, by the demand for replacements, and by the ordinary business of standing and diplomacy, the Five Nations broke their neighbors. In March 1649 they attacked the Wendat homeland; the Wendat Confederacy was shattered within the year, and several thousand Wendat were taken in and adopted. The Tionontaté followed the same year, the Neutral over the next two, the Erie after that, and eventually the Susquehannock. What happened to these peoples was not uniform and it was not extinction: communities were dispersed, absorbed, and in the Wendat case regrouped elsewhere, keeping their councils, their diplomacy, and their identity. What ended was their standing as independent powers in the northeastern woodlands.⁴⁴
An article that praised the peace and left this out would be doing for the Haudenosaunee precisely what this series has refused to do for Europeans. The Great Law is not diminished by the Beaver Wars, any more than the argument for toleration is diminished by the man who made it also writing what he wrote. Both things are true, and the second does not cancel the first. But the sentence that must not be written is the one that says a confederation founded to end war had ended war.
The Ancestor We Wanted
The harder reckoning is nearer home.
Libertarians and decentralists have reached for the Haudenosaunee as an ancestor, and not always carefully. A political organization described as having no standing army, no taxing power, no separate executive, and a council that could not act without agreement is a congenial thing to find in the woods before the Constitution, and the temptation to use it as a trump card in an argument about the modern state has proved strong. The reaching has sometimes involved the same practices this series has criticized in others: half a quotation, a resemblance treated as a lineage, a political claim illustrated as a finding.
The claim that some would use as demonstrable is, in reality, attached to a people who were dispossessed. Making their organizing process into a stand-in for somebody else’s argument is its own way of not seeing that. What can be said is that the Haudenosaunee built something on their own terms, for their own reasons, out of their own catastrophe, and it is not a prototype of anything.
I have already written article 17 on a different thread so I do not need to a new prompt for that. I will need an updated editorial standards file however before I draft article 18.
You can also write a handoff for Article 17 that I can run as a prompt within that thread to view the finished article 17 deliverable.
The Skeptic’s Case
That This Article Has Broken Its Own Rule
The strongest objection is that everything above is special pleading. The last article in this series declined to derive a revolution from a book, on the ground that no chain of transmission could be documented, and it held that line against a genuinely tempting correlation. This article has spent several thousand words establishing that colonists watched a confederation, that its speakers recommended union to them, and that those speeches entered the colonial print record, and then treats the availability of that example as historically significant. The danger is that an available example becomes an influence without the article ever identifying the step between them. If the standard is documented transmission named by the people who did the thing, then the correct output here is not significance but a blank.
The reply is that the article has in fact declined the derivation, and the difference between the two cases is the difference between an influence on the argument and a source of the design. What is asserted here is narrower and every link in it is documented: a named speaker recommended colonial union to colonial commissioners, the recommendation was entered in the treaty record, the record was printed and sold by Franklin’s press, and Franklin’s own letter of 1751 shows that the Six Nations’ union had by then become part of his argument for colonial union. What is not documented is the step between the printing and the letter. What is not asserted is that any provision of any American instrument came from the Great Law. If a reader thinks even the weaker claim is more than the evidence carries, that is a coherent position, and the honest answer is that the line between an available example and a cause is not sharp, and this article has drawn it where it thinks the documents put it.
That Any Federation Resembles Any Other
The comparative case is that the resemblances are what convergent design looks like. Anyone building a common authority over self-governing members faces the same problems: what the center may decide, what it may not, how members are represented, how disagreement is resolved. There are not many available answers, and polities that never heard of one another arrive at similar ones. A council of delegates from constituent nations resembles a senate because both are solutions to the same difficulty, and the resemblance is evidence of the difficulty, not of contact.
This is a serious argument and it has the better of the structural comparisons. The reply is that convergence explains resemblance, but it does not explain the printed record of a Haudenosaunee speaker recommending union to colonial commissioners, which is not a resemblance at all but a communication, made to colonial commissioners in council and printed for sale.
That the Thesis Belongs to Its Moment
The derivation claim reached its widest circulation in the 1980s and 1990s, in the bicentennial years, when American institutions were looking for a founding story with more than one ancestor in it. It was endorsed by a legislature while the specialists were still disputing it, and in the same period it entered school curricula. A proposition whose political usefulness runs ahead of its evidence should be examined with that sequence in mind.
The reply is that this is a point about reception rather than truth. Claims are not false because they are convenient, and a claim’s timing is not an argument about its content. The chronology is a reason to read carefully, not a refutation.
That the Standard Is Not Applied Evenly
The last objection is the one the article owes most, and it cuts against everything above.
This series has built its evidentiary machinery out of print. It asks who cited whom, which edition was in which library, how many copies were sold, and it treats the paper trail as the measure of transmission. Applied to Europe, the machinery works, because colonial and European institutions produced and preserved most of the surviving paper archive. Applied to a polity that kept its law in memory and in shell, the same machinery returns a low reading every time, and it will do so no matter what actually happened, because the record it consults was made by the conquering side. Demanding a documented chain from people whose law was deliberately not written, while accepting for European lineages a standard of evidence that is often little more than a shared vocabulary and a plausible reading list, is two standards with one name. The colonists’ own words about what they were watching are documentary evidence, and the reflex that files this claim under myth has a history of its own, stretching back to a period when American scholarship was quite certain that nothing of political consequence had been invented in these woods.
This objection is substantially correct, and the article concedes it rather than answering it. The best that can be said in defense is that the answer to an uneven standard is to say what each kind of evidence can carry rather than to lower the requirement on one side, which is what this article has tried to do: to state the contact and the observation at full strength, to decline the derivation, and to say plainly that the decline rests on an archive made by one party. A reader who concludes that the archive is the problem and that the article has mistaken a gap in the record for a gap in the history has understood the objection correctly. That is why it is here, and why it goes last.
Two Ways of Keeping a Law
The Americans of 1776 needed two things they did not yet have together: consent that could be organized across a great distance, and limits that would hold when the consenting majority wanted them not to. The last article left them without either.
In the woodlands north and west of the colonies, one of those problems had been solved, and solved for centuries before the colonies existed. Five nations, and then six, held a common council that could not act without agreement, left each nation its own affairs, gave the nomination and the removal of its titleholders to women who held that authority in their own right, and kept a law long enough that a Philadelphia printer, looking at it from outside, called it indissoluble.
They kept it without writing it. That is the fact this article has circled from the beginning, and it cuts two ways. It is why the Great Law survived as a living practice rather than a document to be argued over, and it is why, when the question arose of what the Americans had taken from it, there was nothing to hold up. The colonists kept their law the other way, on paper, in charters and statutes and minute books — the pen and ink work Canassatego pointed at in 1744 — and paper gave them a durable legal archive, which the power of colonial governments then made effective against people whose claims were held in memory and in shell.
What the Americans were about to build, they built mostly out of their own long practice of governing themselves in small places, which had been going on for a hundred and fifty years by the time anyone in Philadelphia wrote anything down about it. That practice is where this series goes next. But colonial Americans in the northern and middle colonies had lived for generations beside evidence that the thing they were arguing about could be done — and Haudenosaunee speakers recommended it to them out loud, in council, in words that were printed and sold in Philadelphia, and were not listened to on the one subject where listening would have cost something.
This is the road to 1776.
Self-Reflection Prompts
The Great Law was carried in memory, in ceremony, and in wampum, and it held for centuries. The American founders wrote everything down. Which method produces a law that is harder to break, and which produces a law that is harder to defend when someone else arrives with a deed?
Canassatego objected, in 1744, to the pen and ink work going on at the table while he spoke — and his words survive only because of it. What does a person lose, and what does a person gain, by having his argument recorded by people whose interests run against him?
The clan mothers nominated and could remove the men who spoke for their clans in the Grand Council. The European constitutional systems the colonists knew had no close analogue to it, and the colonial writers who described the Haudenosaunee at length do not discuss it. What does an observer fail to see, and why?
This article declines a claim that many readers would like to be true, on the ground that the evidence for it comes from an archive made by one side. Is a standard of proof that systematically returns low readings for oral polities a rigorous standard or a biased one, and how would you tell the difference?
The Liberty Test. The Haudenosaunee council could not act at all unless its members agreed, which meant it could rarely act quickly and could never act over a member’s objection. That is a powerful restraint on central authority and a serious limit on collective capacity. Did a government built that way leave the people under it more free or less free than one that can act on a majority — and would you accept the same trade in a government of your own?
Endnotes
Benjamin Franklin to James Parker, March 20, 1751, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press), vol. 4; text consulted at Founders Online, National Archives. The letter was first printed, without Franklin’s name, in [Archibald Kennedy], The Importance of Gaining and Preserving the Friendship of the Indians to the British Interest, Considered (New York, 1751), 27–31; the page range is the one given in the Franklin Papers headnote and has not been checked against the imprint. Spelling and capitalization are those of the printed text. On the dual year in which the letter dates itself, and on the basis for the attribution to Franklin, see the editorial headnote to the letter in the Papers.
A Treaty, Held at the Town of Lancaster, in Pennsylvania, by the Honourable the Lieutenant-Governor of the Province, and the Honourable the Commissioners for the Provinces of Virginia and Maryland, with the Indians of the Six Nations, in June, 1744 (Philadelphia: B. Franklin, 1744), reprinted in Julian P. Boyd, ed., Indian Treaties Printed by Benjamin Franklin, 1736–1762, with an introduction by Carl Van Doren (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1938). On the nations represented and the absence of the Mohawk, and on Weiser as interpreter, see the imprint’s own title and proceedings. On Weiser’s boyhood among the Mohawk, see Wallace, Conrad Weiser.
On the Virginia and Maryland land claims as the business of the council, see the Lancaster proceedings in Boyd, Indian Treaties, 41–79, the range the treaty occupies in that volume. An earlier draft asserted that Governor Gooch of Virginia had made clear he was prepared to use force over the Shenandoah; that characterization rested on an auction catalogue’s description of the imprint rather than on the proceedings or a scholarly account, and it has been removed. No page pinpoint within the range is asserted.
Canassatego’s answer to the commissioner of Maryland, in the court house at Lancaster, June 26, 1744, in the Lancaster proceedings; text consulted in the excerpt published by World History Commons, George Mason University, from Indian Treaties Printed by Benjamin Franklin. The image of the pen and ink work is the speaker’s own, made while pointing at the secretaries, as the minutes record.
Deed of the Six Nations to Virginia, July 2, 1744, printed in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography and consulted in the “Envisaging the West” documentary archive, University of Nebraska–Lincoln. On Virginia’s charter of 1609 and the later reading of the deed as extending west, and on Thomas Lee’s role as a Virginia commissioner at Lancaster and a founder of the Ohio Company, see the Lee–Weiser correspondence in the Richard Peters Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the archive’s own annotation. The characterization of what the Six Nations deputies understood themselves to be conveying is the view generally taken in the literature and is not asserted from the deed alone.
Canassatego’s closing speech, July 4, 1744, in the Lancaster proceedings; Boyd, Indian Treaties, 78. That page reference enters this file on Philip A. Levy’s citation of it and has not been verified against the volume; it is consistent with the University of Nebraska treaties portal’s record that the Lancaster treaty occupies Boyd, 41–79, which places page 78 among the closing proceedings of July 4. The speech is paraphrased here rather than quoted at length. Note that no bundle of arrows appears in it: that image belongs to the Peacemaker’s founding narrative and has migrated into popular retellings of Lancaster.
On Franklin’s printing of Indian treaty proceedings from 1736, see Van Doren’s introduction and Boyd’s notes in Indian Treaties Printed by Benjamin Franklin, 1736–1762.
On Haudenosaunee as the name the Confederacy uses for itself, rendered as people of the longhouse, and on Iroquois as an exonym that reached English through French, see Haudenosaunee Confederacy, “Government,” haudenosauneeconfederacy.com, and the usage of current scholarship. This article uses Haudenosaunee in its own prose and retains Iroquois inside quotations, source titles, and the language of the 1988 resolution.
Haudenosaunee Confederacy, “Government.” The keeper-of-the-door and firekeeper descriptions are the Confederacy’s own.
On the Tuscarora migration from Carolina and their admission around 1722, and on their having no voice in the Grand Council and raising business through the Cayuga, see Haudenosaunee Confederacy, “Government.” Haudenosaunee sources differ on Tuscarora participation: the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s account says the Tuscarora have no voice in the Grand Council and raise business through the Cayuga, while the Onondaga Nation’s account places Tuscarora leaders with the Younger Brothers bench. Both are given here rather than one being preferred. What is not in dispute is that the fifty titles were not added to. The date is given as approximate because accounts place the migration and the formal admission across roughly a decade.
On the form and pace of treaty councils and the convention against answering on the day one is addressed, see the proceedings themselves in Boyd, Indian Treaties, and Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1992). No pinpoint asserted.
On wampum in diplomacy, see Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, and William N. Fenton, The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). The treaty imprints record the giving of belts throughout.
On the Covenant Chain and its maintenance, see Francis Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire (New York: Norton, 1984), and Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse. On Hendrick’s complaint at Albany in 1754 that the chain had been neglected, see O’Callaghan et al., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, vol. 6.
The founding narrative in this section is drawn from the transcribed oral tradition, principally Arthur C. Parker, The Constitution of the Five Nations, or The Iroquois Book of the Great Law, New York State Museum Bulletin 184 (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1916), which prints both the Newhouse manuscript and the Six Nations chiefs’ version, and from the Confederacy’s own account of its founding. On the status and date of these texts, which is not incidental, see Parker’s own account of the manuscripts in The Constitution of the Five Nations.
The Peacemaker is named in the tradition, and the name appears freely in print, including in the transcriptions cited above; many Haudenosaunee hold that it should not be spoken casually, and refer to him by title. The name is Deganawida, also given as Tekanawí:ta, with Skennenrahawi as the Mohawk title rendered as Peace-Maker. This article uses the title in its own prose. Accounts also differ on the roles of the founding figures; the Mother of Nations is Jigonhsasee, and Tadodaho is also given as Adodarhoh and Atotarho, the latter forms being the ones used for the Onondaga firekeeper’s title in the Confederacy’s own account.
Barbara A. Mann and Jerry L. Fields, “A Sign in the Sky: Dating the League of the Haudenosaunee,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 21, no. 2 (1997): 105–63. Authors, title, journal, volume, issue, year, and pages are confirmed from the journal’s own record of the article and its DOI; note that at least one bibliographic aggregator gives the year as 2007. Mann and Fields set out the three candidate datings summarized here — a post-contact date in the mid-sixteenth century, which Dean Snow associates with an eclipse of 1536; a pre-contact date of 1451, likewise eclipse-fixed; and their own argument for August 31, 1142 — before arguing for the earliest. On the archaeological readings, see also Dean R. Snow, The Iroquois (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994). The range is stated as a range because the question is open, and the observation that the proposed dates straddle 1492 follows from the datings themselves.
Haudenosaunee Confederacy, “Government,” for the total of fifty and for the Onondaga’s role as firekeepers. The distribution of nine Mohawk, nine Oneida, fourteen Onondaga, ten Cayuga, and eight Seneca is given consistently across the descriptive literature and sums to fifty.
On hoyaneh as caretakers of the peace, see Haudenosaunee Confederacy, “Government.” Sachem is the English usage of the colonial records and is retained here only where those records are being described.
Haudenosaunee Confederacy, “Government,” for the count of forty-nine clan mothers and its distribution, for the clan mother’s responsibility for the welfare of her clan, and for her selection of the man who holds the title; and Onondaga Nation, “Clan Mothers,” onondaganation.org, for selection and removal. Installation is performed by the condolence council rather than by the clan mother alone, and the text has been written to say so. The count of clan mothers and the count of titles differ by one; the Confederacy’s own account gives both figures as they stand here.
Parker, Constitution of the Five Nations, for the procedure of warning preceding the removal of a titleholder. This is a provision of the transcribed English text and is described here as such; on what that text is, see Parker’s own account of the manuscripts in that volume.
Onondaga Nation, “Government,” onondaganation.org, for the three benches — the Firekeepers, consisting of the fourteen Onondaga titleholders, among whom Tadodaho presides; the Older Brothers, consisting of the nine Mohawk and eight Seneca; and the Younger Brothers, consisting of the nine Oneida and ten Cayuga — and for the order in which a question passes among them and returns. An earlier draft of this article followed a shorter account that grouped the Onondaga with the Mohawk and Seneca as Elder Brothers; that is incorrect, and the Onondaga Nation’s own description of the bench on which its titleholders sit governs.
Seth Newhouse (Dayodekane) arranged a manuscript version at the Six Nations of the Grand River in 1885, which the council there did not endorse; a version compiled by a committee of chiefs of the Six Nations council around 1900 was published separately in the following decade, with sources giving 1911 and 1912 for the printing; Parker collected two manuscripts at Six Nations in 1910 and printed both in The Constitution of the Five Nations (1916). See Parker’s own account of the manuscripts in that volume, and the Library of Congress catalogue record for it. Other renderings include Horatio Hale, The Iroquois Book of Rites (1883); the version dictated in Onondaga by John Arthur Gibson in 1912 and published as Concerning the League in 1992; and a text published by J. N. B. Hewitt in 1928. There is no single English text authorized by the Confederacy as a whole. Every quotation of or reference to the Great Law in this article is a reference to one of these printed English texts, none of which existed before 1883.
No date is asserted here for the Hiawatha belt. Datings placing the surviving object in the eighteenth century circulate in general accounts, but this article could not trace one to a museum catalogue entry or a published object analysis, and so states none. On wampum practice generally, see Onondaga Nation, “Wampum,” onondaganation.org, and Ganondagan, “Wampum,” ganondagan.org. The point in the text concerns the provenance of particular objects, not the antiquity of the practice.
On Conrad Weiser’s arrival with the Palatine migration, his boyhood among the Mohawk, his service as Pennsylvania’s interpreter and agent, and his partnership with Shikellamy, the Oneida stationed on the Susquehanna, see Paul A. W. Wallace, Conrad Weiser, 1696–1760: Friend of Colonist and Mohawk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945), and the Weiser correspondence in the Richard Peters Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, which includes letters to Weiser from Thomas Lee of Virginia in 1744, 1747, and 1748. No pinpoints are asserted.
Boyd, Indian Treaties Printed by Benjamin Franklin, 1736–1762, and Van Doren’s introduction thereto, on the run of imprints and their sale.
On Franklin as clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly, as a commissioner at Carlisle in 1753, and as a Pennsylvania commissioner at the Albany Congress of 1754, see The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vols. 4 and 5, and the list of commissions entered in the Albany proceedings.
Franklin to Parker, March 20, 1751, and the editorial headnote thereto, in Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 4, consulted at Founders Online. The headnote records the printing in Kennedy’s pamphlet, Kennedy’s statement to Cadwallader Colden that the piece would appear with Franklin’s remarks anonymously, and the basis on which the letter is attributed to Franklin. On the dual year, March 20 fell before March 25, the start of the legal year under the Julian calendar then still in use in the British dominions, which is why the letter gives both years; this article gives the date as March 20, 1751, in the modern style, and notes the instrument’s own form here rather than silently converting it.
Franklin to Parker, March 20, 1751, the paragraph immediately following the sentence quoted as this article’s epigraph. Franklin’s proposal there is paraphrased rather than quoted.
Proceedings of the Albany Congress, June 19 to July 11, 1754, in Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 5, consulted at Founders Online. The characterization of the Indians’ land complaints as the principal occasion of the meeting is from the text of the commissioners’ message to Lieutenant Governor DeLancey, prepared by Thomas Hutchinson and Franklin, which the editors print in full. Note that the Franklin Papers give only an abstract of the proceedings and expressly omit the substance of the speeches delivered to and by the Indians; for those, see O’Callaghan et al., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, vol. 6, and the other printings of the full proceedings.
Answer of the Six Nations, delivered by Hendrick Theyanoguin and entered in the Congress minutes under July 2, 1754. The full proceedings, including the Indian speeches, are printed in E. B. O’Callaghan et al., eds., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, vol. 6 (Albany, 1855), 853–92; in O’Callaghan, ed., The Documentary History of the State of New York, vol. 2, 317–60; and in Pennsylvania Colonial Records, vol. 6, 57–110. The page ranges are those given by the editors of the Franklin Papers and have not been checked against the volumes. Text of the speech consulted in the transcription published by the Oklahoma State University treaties collection and in the excerpt published by History Matters, George Mason University. The minutes read that the English are all like women bare and open without any fortifications; the shorter form usually quoted drops the word “all.” Hendrick’s address was a demand for defence, for the renewal of the Covenant Chain, and for redress on land, delivered to the assembled commissioners. It is not a recommendation about how the colonies should constitute themselves, and this article does not treat it as one.
Proceedings of the Albany Congress, editorial note on the separate Pennsylvania negotiations of July 5 and 6, 1754, at James Stevenson’s house in Albany, with Conrad Weiser acting as interpreter, and on Governor Hamilton’s written instruction to the Pennsylvania commissioners to purchase land and the larger the better; Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 5, at Founders Online, citing Pennsylvania Colonial Records, vol. 6, 110–29. The boundary description in the text — from the Maryland line northeast along the Kittatinny or Blue Hills to the Susquehanna, up the west bank to a point below the mouth of the West Branch, and thence to the limits of the province — is the editors’ summary of the deed. The editors also note that Franklin was not formally a party to the transaction; he was one of the four Pennsylvania commissioners present. An earlier draft described the tract as everything in Pennsylvania west of the Kittatinny ridge and as a third of the province; neither is supported by the deed as summarized, and both have been removed. The one-third figure appears in accounts of the separate Susquehannah Company purchase of July 11, 1754, which is a different transaction.
The Albany Plan of Union, July 10, 1754, in Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 5, at Founders Online, for the President-General appointed and supported by the Crown, the requirement of his assent to all acts of the Grand Council, the Grand Council chosen by the colonial assemblies, and the power to lay taxes. On the vote of July 2, 1754 to proceed on a plan to be established by act of Parliament, see the proceedings and the editors’ comparison with Theodore Atkinson’s memorandum book, which records the division differently from the official minutes. On Franklin’s change of position from the voluntary union he preferred in 1751, see the editorial note to the Parker letter.
Editorial note to Franklin’s Proposed Articles of Confederation of July 1775, Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 22, at Founders Online, which states that Franklin’s principal source was argued to be the New England confederation of 1643 and that his earlier hints resembled it as well. The editors’ proposition is reported here as theirs.
Donald A. Grinde, Jr., The Iroquois and the Founding of the American Nation (San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1977); Bruce E. Johansen, Forgotten Founders: Benjamin Franklin, the Iroquois and the Rationale for the American Revolution (Ipswich, Mass.: Gambit, 1982); Donald A. Grinde, Jr., and Bruce E. Johansen, Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy (Los Angeles: American Indian Studies Center, University of California, 1991). Publishers and places for the first two are given as they appear in the standard citations of this literature and have not been confirmed from the publishers’ records.
Elisabeth Tooker, “The United States Constitution and the Iroquois League,” Ethnohistory 35, no. 4 (Autumn 1988): 305–36; Bruce E. Johansen, “Native American Societies and the Evolution of Democracy in America, 1600–1800,” Ethnohistory 37, no. 3 (1990): 279–90; Elisabeth Tooker, “Rejoinder to Johansen,” Ethnohistory 37, no. 3 (1990): 291–97. Note that at least one bibliographic aggregator gives Tooker’s 1988 pagination as 107–128; the JSTOR record for the article gives 305–36 and is followed here.
Forum, “The Iroquois Influence Thesis — Con and Pro,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 53, no. 3 (July 1996): Philip A. Levy, “Exemplars of Taking Liberties: The Iroquois Influence Thesis and the Problem of Evidence,” 588–604; Samuel B. Payne, Jr., “The Iroquois League, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution,” 605–20; Donald A. Grinde, Jr., and Bruce E. Johansen, “Sauce for the Goose: Demand and Definitions for ‘Proof’ Regarding the Iroquois and Democracy,” 621–36. Pagination is from the journal’s own table of contents for the July 1996 issue, in which the three pieces run consecutively. Levy’s middle initial is given as A. by the publisher; at least one aggregator gives I.
S.Con.Res. 76, 100th Congress, introduced September 16, 1987; hearings before the Committee on Indian Affairs, December 2, 1987; reported by Senator Daniel Inouye with an amended preamble, September 30, 1988, Senate report 100-565; agreed to in the Senate without amendment by voice vote, October 7, 1988. It was not passed by the House. H.Con.Res. 331, 100th Congress, agreed to October 21, 1988, printed at 102 Stat. 4932–33, is the measure that cleared both chambers, and its preamble is the source of the language described here. H.Con.Res. 331 passed the House 408 to 8 on October 4, 1988 and was agreed to in the Senate by voice vote on October 21, 1988; that vote detail entered this file on an auditor’s reading of the Congress.gov actions page and has not been checked here. Legislative history otherwise from Congress.gov; text of H.Con.Res. 331 from the Statutes at Large as reproduced by GovTrack. The resolution begins on 102 Stat. 4932 and continues onto 4933; that pagination entered this file on an auditor’s inspection of the GovInfo page images for volume 102 and has not been checked against the printed volume here. On what a concurrent resolution is and is not, see the same records.
On the failure of neutrality, the division of the Confederacy by 1777, the alignment of the Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca with the British and of the Oneida and Tuscarora with the Americans, the fact that individuals in each nation chose separately, and the covering of the fire at Onondaga, see Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, “Haudenosaunee Lands and the American Revolution,” Native Knowledge 360; and Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse.
On Oriskany, August 6, 1777, and its character as an engagement fought between men of the same confederacy, see Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, “Haudenosaunee Lands and the American Revolution,” Native Knowledge 360. An earlier draft described the engagement as proportionally among the bloodiest of the war; that comparison is not established by the cited source and has been removed.
On the raid of April 1779 against the Onondaga settlements under Goose Van Schaick, see Onondaga Nation, “Timeline,” onondaganation.org; the Smithsonian materials below date it to April 16. Washington’s instructions are quoted from “From George Washington to Major General John Sullivan, 31 May 1779,” in The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, ed. Edward G. Lengel, vol. 20, 8 April–31 May 1779 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 716–19. Sullivan’s report is “Major General John Sullivan to George Washington, 28 September 1779,” in the same series, ed. Benjamin L. Huggins, vol. 22, 1 August–21 October 1779 (2013), 528–41. Both pinpoints are as given by Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, “American Revolution: Haudenosaunee Perseverance,” Native Knowledge 360, chapter 4, which reproduces both documents; the volumes have not been inspected here. Sullivan’s own count in that letter is forty towns destroyed by his army besides scattering houses, with one town left standing near the Allegheny and 160,000 bushels of corn destroyed; modern accountings, including the Smithsonian’s and the National Park Service’s, give over forty for the season, which includes Van Schaick’s raid in April and Clinton’s operations as well as the scattered settlements Sullivan counted separately. The two figures count different things and the text gives both. In the same letter Sullivan describes his instructions to the Oneida as being to extirpate the unfriendly nations, subdue their country, destroy their crops, and drive them to seek habitations elsewhere, which is his own gloss on his orders rather than Washington’s wording. The Smithsonian source states that over forty Haudenosaunee towns were destroyed, and describes the flight to Fort Niagara, the insufficiency of British supplies, and the deaths that winter. An earlier revision of this article reduced the figure to forty on an auditor’s report that the cited source said forty; the source says over forty, and the original wording has been restored. No comparison is asserted between deaths after the campaign and deaths in the fighting, and no population figures are given, because the versions available could not be traced to a named authority. On the campaign’s dates and the action at Newtown on August 29, 1779, see the accounts of the expedition generally; no pinpoint is asserted.
On the Cayuga clan mothers’ appeal, the four Oneida leaders who carried it to Sullivan, and his refusal, see Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, “Haudenosaunee Lands and the American Revolution,” Native Knowledge 360. The refusal is also in Sullivan’s own hand: his letter to Washington of September 28, 1779 encloses the Oneida request that the Cayuga cornfields be spared and his answer calling the request new and surprising and declining it. That enclosure is printed with the letter at Founders Online.
On the Second Treaty of Fort Stanwix of 1784 and the Treaty of Canandaigua of 1794, see Onondaga Nation, “The Canandaigua Treaty of 1794” and “Timeline,” onondaganation.org. On the removal of Six Nations people to the Grand River in Ontario under British grant after the war, see the same and the standard accounts of the Haldimand grant.
On the gathering of Seneca, Onondaga, and Cayuga refugees at Buffalo Creek, its emergence by 1783 as the Confederacy’s new political center, and the councils held there to reconstitute the Confederacy, see Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, “Independence for Whom?: Expansion and Conflict in the Northeast and Northwest,” in The World of the Revolutionary American Republic: Land, Labor, and the Conflict for a Continent, ed. Andrew Shankman (New York: Routledge, 2014), 125, quoted in Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, “American Revolution: Haudenosaunee Perseverance,” Native Knowledge 360, chapter 4. The pinpoint is the one the Smithsonian gives for the passage; the volume has not been inspected here.
On the wars of the seventeenth century, the mourning war and the adoption of captives, the attack on the Wendat homeland in March 1649 and the absorption of several thousand Wendat, and the subsequent breaking of the Petun, the Neutral, the Erie, and the Susquehannock, see Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse; Bruce G. Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1976); and Kathryn Magee Labelle, Dispersed But Not Destroyed: A History of the Seventeenth-Century Wendat People (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013). Labelle’s argument is that the Wendat were dispersed but not destroyed — that communities regrouped and maintained leadership, councils, diplomacy, and political identity — and the text has been written to say so. An earlier draft said that these peoples ceased to exist as polities, which contradicts the source cited for them. No pinpoints are asserted.
Sources and Further Reading
Primary Sources
A Treaty, Held at the Town of Lancaster, in Pennsylvania, with the Indians of the Six Nations, in June, 1744. Philadelphia: B. Franklin, 1744.
Boyd, Julian P., ed. Indian Treaties Printed by Benjamin Franklin, 1736–1762. Introduction by Carl Van Doren. Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1938.
Franklin, Benjamin. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. Edited by Leonard W. Labaree et al. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959– . Consulted at Founders Online, National Archives.
Hale, Horatio. The Iroquois Book of Rites. Philadelphia, 1883.
[Kennedy, Archibald.] The Importance of Gaining and Preserving the Friendship of the Indians to the British Interest, Considered. New York, 1751.
O’Callaghan, E. B., et al., eds. Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York. Vol. 6. Albany, 1855.
Parker, Arthur C. The Constitution of the Five Nations, or The Iroquois Book of the Great Law. New York State Museum Bulletin 184. Albany: University of the State of New York, 1916.
Pennsylvania Colonial Records. Vol. 6.
United States Congress. H.Con.Res. 331, 100th Cong., 102 Stat. 4932–33 (1988); S.Con.Res. 76, 100th Cong. (1988).
Washington, George. The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series. Edited by Edward G. Lengel, Benjamin L. Huggins, et al. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010–13.
Woodbury, Hanni, et al., eds. Concerning the League: The Iroquois League Tradition as Dictated in Onondaga by John Arthur Gibson. Winnipeg: Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics, 1992.
Secondary Works
Fenton, William N. The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.
Grinde, Donald A., Jr. The Iroquois and the Founding of the American Nation. San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1977.
Grinde, Donald A., Jr., and Bruce E. Johansen. “Sauce for the Goose: Demand and Definitions for ‘Proof’ Regarding the Iroquois and Democracy.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 53, no. 3 (1996): 621–36.
Grinde, Donald A., Jr., and Bruce E. Johansen. Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy. Los Angeles: American Indian Studies Center, University of California, 1991.
Haudenosaunee Confederacy. “Government.” haudenosauneeconfederacy.com. Accessed September 2026.
Jennings, Francis. The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire. New York: Norton, 1984.
Johansen, Bruce E. “Native American Societies and the Evolution of Democracy in America, 1600–1800.” Ethnohistory 37, no. 3 (1990): 279–90.
Johansen, Bruce E. Forgotten Founders: Benjamin Franklin, the Iroquois and the Rationale for the American Revolution. Ipswich, Mass.: Gambit, 1982.
Labelle, Kathryn Magee. Dispersed But Not Destroyed: A History of the Seventeenth-Century Wendat People. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013.
Levy, Philip A. “Exemplars of Taking Liberties: The Iroquois Influence Thesis and the Problem of Evidence.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 53, no. 3 (1996): 588–604.
Mann, Barbara A., and Jerry L. Fields. “A Sign in the Sky: Dating the League of the Haudenosaunee.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 21, no. 2 (1997): 105–63.
Mt. Pleasant, Alyssa. “Independence for Whom?: Expansion and Conflict in the Northeast and Northwest.” In The World of the Revolutionary American Republic: Land, Labor, and the Conflict for a Continent, edited by Andrew Shankman. New York: Routledge, 2014.
Onondaga Nation. “Government,” “Chiefs,” “Clan Mothers,” “Wampum,” and “Timeline.” onondaganation.org. Accessed September 2026.
Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. “American Revolution: Haudenosaunee Perseverance” and “Haudenosaunee Lands and the American Revolution.” Native Knowledge 360. americanindian.si.edu. Accessed September 2026.
Payne, Samuel B., Jr. “The Iroquois League, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 53, no. 3 (1996): 605–20.
Richter, Daniel K. The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1992.
Snow, Dean R. The Iroquois. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994.
Tooker, Elisabeth. “Rejoinder to Johansen.” Ethnohistory 37, no. 3 (1990): 291–97.
Tooker, Elisabeth. “The United States Constitution and the Iroquois League.” Ethnohistory 35, no. 4 (1988): 305–36.
Trigger, Bruce G. The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1976.
Wallace, Paul A. W. Conrad Weiser, 1696–1760: Friend of Colonist and Mohawk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945.
Next: Article 17 — “Self-Government Before Theory”
Comments